How to set a crowdfunding campaign’s goal

When you are planning your crowdfunding campaign, having a concrete and specific objective to share with your potential backers is fundamental, because it helps you you to calculate and define your goal.

Take Costs Into Account

Depending on what you’re doing with your campaign, your goal will have to take into account costs of production, shipping and the like. To define these costs, you should spend time during the campaign preparation understanding and selecting the best and cheapest alternatives, so to try to keep your costs as low as possible and, thus, lower your final goal. In fact if there’s one thing crowdfunding statistics are clear about, the lower your goal is, the greater your odds are of obtaining or exceeding it.

Campaign Timing

Your final target budget may depend also on external factors that might impact on the collection of funds, especially if you are working with rewards crowdfunding. For instance, are there external factors that place a deadline on how soon you need the funding? Are there any seasonal events – e.g. Christmas – that will happen during your campaign, and will they foster or hinder it? You should try to map these events and external factors and understand how they could impact on your goal.

Keep it Real

When setting the target goal of your campaign, you should try to keep it as much real as possible. Everyone would love to collect €50.000 through a crowdfunding campaign, but not every project has the premises to do so. You should consider the issues raised above, your networks -i.e. what type of persons you are connected to – and your funding needs. Estimate a target budget and ask yourself: given the networks I am connected to and that I can easily tap into, would I be realistically able to reach the target budget in the set time? If the answer is no, you need to re-estimate the goal, if the answer is yes, you can go on. However, always keep it mind that lowering further the target budget may be a very good strategy. In fact, it makes your campaign more achievable and it makes certain you’ll be able to deliver on your promises. And a successful campaign has a greater marketing and visibility return than one that did not meet its target.

In general, always remember that lowering your goal doesn’t not mean that you cannot collect more money than what you set. In fact, if the money pledged exceeds the goal, in most of the cases, the platforms allow you to bring all the funding home.

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This post was originally published as part of Startup Europe. The European Commission’s Startup Europe initiative was created to connect web entrepreneurs across Europe, providing networks, resources and information to help them startup their business and grow, creating new jobs and transforming the economy and society.